Re: Lost events during boot

On Sun, Mar 19, 2017 at 9:46 PM, Steve Grubb <sgrubb(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote: > Hello Richard and Paul, > > I was going to do a blog write up about booting the system with > audit_backlog_limit=8192 for STIG users and have stumbled on to a mystery. > The kernel initializes the variable to 64 at power on. During boot, if > audit == 1, then it holds events in the hopes that an audit daemon will > show up later and drain all the events. Anything over 64 events should > fall off the end and increment the lost counter and put a notice in > syslog. > > However, when booting with audit_backlog_limit=8192, as soon as I log in I > run "auditctl -s" I can see I've lost 73 events. The I run "aureport > --start boot" and I see 644 total events. This is nowhere near the 8192 > limit that I asked for. So, why am I losing events? > > Additionally, I checked the logs and there is absolutely no message in > syslog showing that I've lost events. This is with failure mode set to 1 > - which is default at power on. And this is in spite of the the fact that > the source code seems to show that it should have printk'ed something. > > Any ideas? Can you replicate this finding? It's funny, I just noticed this for the first time on Friday (the exact same lost count too), although it was a development kernel build with a *heavily* modified audit subsystem so I just assumed I had broken something with the queuing, the lost counter, or both. It's possible I still may have broken something in the v4.10 queue rework, or something broke a long time ago and we are just noticing it now. First off, can you create a GitHub issue for this

and include your kernel build (e.g. 'uname -r')?

Second, if you are seeing this on a +v4.10 kernel, do you see the same results with a +v4.9 kernel?